Flicks with Chicks 'n' Dicks : Sex Spa USA (1984)

"Dan, how does one swing?" asks Jane Malzone (Honey Wilder) of her husband Dan (Paul Thomas) as they sit at the bar on their first visit to the Sex Spa (a kind of Plato's Retreat-style swinger's club).

"I don't know, Jane," he replies. "How does one swing?"

Their question will be answered as the movie progresses.

But first lets backtrack and find out what has led them, along with the other primary characters, and indeed, ourselves, to this point.

What has led me to this point is the misunderstanding that this movie is about a health club. Since I'm planning to write a blog post on the sexy side of gyms, workouts and health farms, I thought this would be a good film to watch and review. After all the IMDB synopsis says : Brooke Fields builds up a sweat, but it is more than your normal exercise workout. Losing weight, getting/staying in shape has never been this much fun in this classic porn title. But this Sex Spa is as much about getting fit as a gay bath house is about getting clean. They have a pool, but nobody really swims in it, and there are no treadmills or exercise bikes.  But, what the hell, I thought I'd just swing with it and review it anyway.

The film is the work of prolific porn director Henri Pachard (born Ronald Jason Sullivan in 1939). He directed some softcore sexploitation movies under his own name in the sixties and seventies including the porn parody Video Vixens (aka Black Socks) (1975). The alternative title is a reference to the fact that actors in old stag movies often wore nothing but a pair of black socks. But by the end of the seventies, Sullivan had become Pachard and was directing hardcore movies. A couple of his early ones - The Budding of Brie (1980) and Matinee Idol (1984) were produced by David F. Friedman. But by the nineties he was making videos with titles like Earth Girls are Sleazy (1990), Vagina Town (1993) and TV Toilet Challenge (1993). He died in 2008 at the age of 69.

The film was scripted by Rick Marx, who, after writing porno chic classics like Roommates (1981) and Wanda Whips Wallstreet (1982), would go on to script b-grade action films like Platoon Leader (1988) and Outlaw of Gor (1989).

The film begins with two married couples, a pair of lovers and a brother and sister. Each pair are brought to the Sex Spa by something different.

Ted Raddicks (Joey Silvera) is a successful engineer and his wife Leslie (Annette Heinz) is a dental hygienist. They are deeply in love. One night, Ted is trying to tell his wife just how much he is in love with her. She insists that she too really loves him. But he asks how they can really be sure if they have never put their love to the test. He suggests that they need to be somewhere where people are nude and having sex in front of them and where they have the opportunity to join in and maybe themselves have sex with another partner. The thought clearly turns him on, and his wife is at least amused by it. He suggests that they go right away.

What leads Dan and Jane to try to learn how to swing is sexual boredom, brought on by poor communication.

"Oh, God. The same thing every night," bemoans Jane's inner voice as Dan climbs into bed with her. "I wish he'd try something different for a change."

"Just my luck," grumbles Dan's inner voice. "I marry a woman with no imagination. Every night the same time, same place... What a bore!"

"We can make love now?" he asks aloud nudging his stiff cock towards the entrance of his wife's pussy.

"All right," she replies.

But then she winces.

"Dan," she complains, "I am not a hole in the wall."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he answers, "I was just under the impression that a woman was supposed to lubricate."

"Well, you know, foreplay - fore - play - get it," she complains.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he apologizes, "I'll try again." Then he tells her, "Don't move, don't move," as he sets up a controlled, barely perceptible rhythm.

"Does that feel good?" he asks.

Her internal voice is back, complaining, "Why can't I have a man who is into all kinds of things? Likes to play with dildos and vibrators...who'd like to eat me and wrestle with me... and watch me pee?"

And Dan's inner voice is thinking, "Why can't I have a woman who's got all sorts of different interests? Who likes to play with sex toys... who's able to give me blow jobs... and to wrestle with me and to let me watch her pee?"

A short while later he says, "I think I'm gonna cum now."

"Please, go ahead," she tells him, sounding infinitely bored.

Afterwards she tells Dan that their sex life is boring. He says he was going to say something but didn't want to hurt her feelings. Then he suggests very tentatively that they visit a swing club. To his astonishment, she agrees. They get out of bed and get ready right away.

Best-selling novelist Joe Clinton (Jerry Butler - the Robert Downey, Jr. of porn) drops off his latest manuscript to secretary Mary (Brooke Fields), and, since her boss is out, he fucks her in the office. But when the cleaning lady interrupts them they have to leave. 

"How 'bout we go to a place where you could have sex at your whim," he suggests. "Now listen, you could have any man you want, O.K. You could have your pussy serviced in a hundred different ways. Really! You reach orgasm time after time and you cum with gut-wrenching delight, pouring out buckets and buckets of sizzling woman-jizz." He's a smooth-talker.

"I don't have to do anything I don't want to, do I?" she asks, doubtfully.

"No. No," he reassures her. "Your orgasms... they're purely optional. And mine are essential."

Sandy (Taija Rae) has dragged her brother Sam (David Scott) along with her to the Sex Spa. She wants some girl-on-girl action, but her husband mustn't find out, so Sam is posing as her partner. He's not very happy about it.

As our main characters gather in the club, a live sex show is going on on stage. The act ends with Georgie (George Payne) cumming on the girl's tongue.

Then the MC comes on the stage. He's played by Fred J. Lincoln (director of such titles as Furburgers (Home of the Box Lunch) (1987), Friday the 13th : A Nude Beginning (1987), Willie Wankers and the Fun Factory (1994), Trannie Claus (1994) and Prettiest Tits I Ever Came Across (2004).

Is it entirely a coincidence that he looks a lot like this guy?

That's free love encounter group guru, Paul Lowe. To find out more about him watch the excellent documentary The Workshop (2007). That film and Sex Spa USA have a few things in common. Each is about a bunch of people looking for some improvement in their lives who gather around a long-haired bearded dude in a particular location, take off their clothes, engage in some orgiastic activities and end up  feeling liberated. Well, actually, that last bit is more the case in Sex Spa USA than in The Workshop. Some of those people just went back to being ordinarily neurotic when they got home. But what's with the similar look? Did Paul Lowe once watch Sex Spa USA and decided to model himself on the great Mr. Lincoln? Or is it something to do with evolution that makes group grope entrepreneurs adopt the same kind of tonsorial decoration?

Anyway, the MC announces that there will be a contest to find the hottest couple in the joint. Of the judge he says, "Big Brother is watching you. If he's not too busy jerking off that is."

The Contest Judge (Jose Duval) flits around the club like Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, watching all the fucking couples.

The first couple watched by the Judge, and also an excited Joe and bored Mary, are Sandy and her blonde hook-up, who make love sensuously on zebra skin cushions to the sweet sounds of a chanteuse singing a song called Fantasy Lady on the soundtrack. During their post-orgasmic pillow talk they discover they have a lot in common. Not only are they lesbians, but they both come from Scarsdale and have husbands who are in computing.

Our next couple, both strangers to us, are into incestuous age-play. Daddy (Bobby Astyr) is talking to Little Girl (Renee Summers) about her day at school, how she did well on her test, how she played with her best friend, and how they played with each other, until they got caught by her friend's mother. All the while Daddy is undressing and fondling her her.

"That's obscene!" objects a watching Dan.

"I know!" his wife responds. "Isn't it wonderful!"

Next Ted and Leslie discover a couple making love on the side of the pool. At first they are shy, but then they strip off and lay in the water watching.

Meanwhile Dan and Jane meet up with Joe and Mary in the undressing room. Mary is still having doubts and Joe is cajoling her. But when Joe and Jane set eyes on each other there is an obvious attraction. Jane is a little shy but she lets Joe help her get out of her clothes.

On the way to the "mat room" they bump into Ted and Leslie.

Once at their destination, Joe and Jane start making love. Dan asks Ted if he can kiss Leslie, whose towel at this point is covering only one of her boobs and none of her pubic hair. They agree that that is all right since it is "only a test." Ted asks Mary if she wants to "get it on". She says, "No thanks, it's already on."

Ted asks if he can watch Joe and Jane, but Joe says that there is room for him to join in.

"You got that right," sighs a delighted Jane. "Two guys at once? Let me tell you how I imagine it."

She gets Joe to suck her tit and Ted to suck her clit. Then she asks them both to play with themselves. It's one of the sexiest scenes in the film, because we can feel Jane's excitement that she is finally able to live out her sexual fantasies.

As the orgy gathers steam, Georgie is in his dressing room with Little Girl. He's disgusted with himself for being a live sex performer. It makes him feel dirty.

Little Girl decides that, if he is feeling dirty, she should give him a bath. She bathes him tenderly. She washes his cock and then sucks it. She washes his butt and then licks his butthole. Then she gets in the bath with him and he cums over her boob.

When we return to our main characters, Jane is really letting out her inner slut, sucking Joe voraciously while being fucked doggy-style by Ted.

As he slides his cock in and out of  Leslie's mouth, something snaps in Dan and he calls his wife a "slut" for "sucking that asshole's dick".

Ted starts spanking Jane's ass as they get close to climax. And Dan unleashes his fury as he fucks Leslie doggie-style.

Everyone cums.

But Mary, who had just been watching, walks off looking bored.

She goes to the pool and watches other people having fun.

There she makes a tentative connection with Sam, the other person who doesn't really want to be there. He responds to her glance and comes over and sits next to her. Meanwhile a woman sings another lush pop song on the soundtrack.

"I suppose there's not much to do here but swim and talk," says Sam.

"I haven't seen much swimming. And I haven't seen much talking either," Mary replies.

"Me neither," agrees Sam.

"I don't like promiscuous sex," explains Mary. "I think people should know each other... have some kind of feeling. I think it is important for them to have emotional understanding between them."

Sam agrees and asks to kiss her.

Now that they know each other so intimately, the public bonking can begin. And a crowd quickly gathers.

As they climax it causes a sensation and....

...they win the prize. A life membership each to the Sex Spa!

Joe wonders if there really is much to this whole swinging scene. When two gorgeous girls join him at the bar he decides maybe his doubts were premature.

Look for Ajita Wilson's very brief appearance in the pool scene. Ajita Wilson was born George Wilson in Brooklyn in 1950. After working as a transvestite entertainer in New York, George had a sex change and became Ajita in the mid-70s. She appeared in adult films in New York before being discovered by a European hardcore film producer. She made hardcore films in Europe before crossing over to softcore films in 1978.

Sex Spa USA is no classic. But it is worth seeing for fans of 80's porn mainly because it has characters one can identify with and care about, and also because it has a wry sense of humour to its look at sexual relationships, particularly within marriage.

Flicks with Chicks : The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961)

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre was the film that kicked off David F. Friedman's success as a producer. For many years he'd been in the film distribution business, and a year before making this film he'd teamed up with director Herschell Gordon Lewis for a black and white drama called Living Venus (1960) about a man who starts a men's magazine (inspired by the story of Hugh Heffner). But it was not until ex-burlesque dancer Rose La Rose suggested that he shoot some colour equivalents to the black and white nudie shorts that were popular with customers at the strip joint she ran in Toledo, that Friedman came up with the idea of a colour nudie comedy which would consist of a series of short sketches with a baggy pants style comic as a connecting character and each section featuring different young women shedding their clothes. This was not a new idea. Russ Meyer had done the same thing a couple of years earlier with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), but for Friedman and Lewis it turned out to be a ticket to success.

First they had to come up with a title. From their school days they remembered a series of dirty jokes about a fortunate Frenchman named Lucky Pierre who always found himself in sexy situations. (In the movie the character only speaks in the first episode, and he is not French.) It took them all of six hours to write a script. As Friedman said at the time, "This isn't Gone with the Wind..."

The next task was to find six attractive young women who were prepared to bare all on the silver screen. A much harder task in 1961 than it would be today. First Friedman made the rounds of the strip joints, but didn't manage to find the fresh flowers he sought. “They looked good in the stills,” he said. “In person they looked like they’d come from a chorus of fifty - some where younger, but most where fifty.” Eventually he managed to find a very pretty girl in her twenties by the name of Linda Cotton. She was from the Deep South and had a horrible accent, but that was O.K. It wouldn’t be a speaking part.

Next they found their star in funny-looking club comic Billy Falbo, who had played a small role in Living Venus. He might have been a bottom-of-the-barrel comic purveying prehistoric gags at Elks conventions, but he wasn't going to sell himself short. "You guys'll have to deal with my agent," he told them. "I'll tell you now, I don't come cheap. Especially for moom pictures." After some hard bargaining they got him for $500 for four days. "If you go another day, it's another hundred and fifty," the agent warned. "If I go over four days, I'm broke," Friedman assured him.

Our Hero

While on a sales trip to Minneapolis, Friedman was lucky enough to discover a model agency which had about fifty good-looking young women on its books who would work nude. After spending an afternoon over the onerous task of surveying what eight of them had to offer, he selected two blondes, both with the surname Olsen, though no relations. When he arrived back in Chicago he found that Lewis had hired another three girls. He was happy that the casting of the females was complete, but less so that the women his partner had selected looked like they could have been the Olsen girls' moms.

Also in the cast was Bill Kerwin, playing an angry husband. Kerwin appeared in many Lewis/Friedman productions, including Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! He had a long career in both television and exploitation movies.

Bill Kerwin

Cast and crew expenditures on the film totalled $2,450. Lewis did the camerawork and Friedman the sound recording. They were the entire crew. Lewis composed the score and wrote the title song. The soundtrack was played by two musicians, Lewis himself on organ and his friend Larry Wellington on drums, xylophone and saxophone. Friedman was the recording engineer. The total cost of the production came to $7,138.46 which meant there was enough left of the $7,500 invested to pay for posters, pressbooks and trailers.

Friedman made a deal with the owner of the Fox Theatre in Minneapolis, an ex-burlesque joint turned movie house, that he could have the world premiere of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, as long as Friedman and his partner's got an unheard of 35% of the gross. In the first week, the gross was $12,000. In the three weeks the film played in that one cinema, they almost recouped their original investment.

To those born after it was made, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre must seem like an artefact of some long  dead civilisation. I was born a year after it was unleashed upon the world, and that was, as far as I remember it, a very different world from the one we live in now. This was a time when sexy movies had no sex in them. When nudity alone threatened the very foundations of western civilisation. In the years that followed, these movies would get weirder and weirder. We had Nude on the Moon (1961) in which astronauts discover a "nudist colony" on the moon populated by telepathic men and women wearing gold lamé briefs and Naked Complex (1963) in which a psychiatrist tries to cure the hero's fear of women by taking him to see a snake dancer at a seedy nightclub. It's not just the gorgeous (and sometimes not so gorgeous) naked women that make these films fun to watch, it is also the fact that they are batshit crazy.

Which leads us nicely to the film's pre-title sequence. The only one with spoken dialogue. Pierre is a cigar-smoking psychiatrist and his woman patient is complaining that she feels as if people are staring at her everywhere she goes. All we can see is her high heals and Pierre is lost in a game of noughts and crosses. "Why should people be staring at you?" he asks. "The whole idea is ridiculous!" You don't exactly have to be M. Night Shyamalan to guess that, when she stands up, she is wearing nothing but those shoes.

Pardon My Pigments is the title of the next sequence which finds three nude models posing for painter Pierre in an field. When they finally get a look at his painting - an abstract - they break it over his head.

The Plumber's Friend finds Pierre at work mending the pipes in a couple's bathroom. Neither he, nor the husband, seem to notice when the wife comes in and takes a bath, even though, at one point, she hands Pierre a wrench. As she slowly towels off her luscious nude body, Pierre just sits their playing with his tool. Errr, so to speak. But once she is dressed again, they both see each other, she runs and fetches her husband and Pierre is forced to demonstrate the work he has been doing, of course ending up being sprayed by the shower.

In For the Birds Pierre is a amateur ornithologist who ends up watching birds of a different kind with his binoculars. On his lunch break out in the woods he spots two women who are in the mood for a bit of sunbathing. One, a stacked redhead in purple capri pants, he takes a fancy to. The other, an older brunette, he doesn't. Unluckily for him, it is the brunette who strips completely nude, while the redhead just fiddles with her top. His time up, Pierre walks off in disgust, at which moment the redhead finally bares her breasts.

Next we find Pierre as The Photographer's Apprentice. Much like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, Pierre decides to play while the master is away. He's just sweeping up the studio when models start to arrive. He pretends to be the photographer and gets them to strip off, but, when he photographs them, they disappear.

Friedman and Lewis really outdid themselves with the film's closing segment - Drive-In Me Crazy - which was also the most challenging to film, as they were shooting nude girls in a real drive-in during the day time.

Pierre drives 124 miles to a drive-in which is playing a double feature of I Was a Teenage Nudist and 10 Days in a Nudist Camp, plus 65 cartoons! When he drives in he finds that the girl in the ticket booth is naked, as are the other girls who serve him popcorn. Up first is the short subject Picnic at the Playground - "In Glorious Black & White on Our New NARROW SCREEN". It turns out the stars of the film are the same girls who work in the drive-in. They lay down a picnic blanket, strip off all of their clothes and start playing with a football shaped beach ball. At one stage they throw the ball off of the screen. It lands in Pierre's lap in his car. One of the girls waves to him to throw it back, so he does, and she catches it. Then the girl's climb on the monkey bars. "Want to See These Beauties in Color?" asks the screen. For a few moments we see the lovelies smiling, waving their hands around and shaking their boobies in full glorious colour. And then another message comes up - "That's All - You Only Paid to See Black & White!" Back to black and white as they continue to play on the play equipment. Finally, just as the sign announcing the main attraction comes up, a truck parks in front of Pierre obscuring his view of the screen. When it moves away, the show is over.

 The drive-in sequence is actually surprisingly imaginative. It would be 24 more years before Woody Allen would have characters in a movie theatre interacting with those on screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Of course Buster Keaton had stepped into the movie screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Daffy Duck had had his onscreen life totally screwed up by the mystery animator in Chuck Jones' classic cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). But in 1961 it was still very "meta" to have an interactive drive-in screen.

Throughout the movie, Pierre has been throwing a pair of dice and coming up with snake eyes. In a brief epilogue he is walking dejectedly past a forest. Nude girls look out from behind the trees. He decides to give the dice one more try. And he throws a seven! Joyously he runs off into the woods to join the frolicking naked girls. Isn't there a lesson there for all of us?

I think the philosophy of the nudie cutie is that the sight of nude girls will reduce the intelligence of male audience members sufficiently to render the corny jokes actually funny. I don't know about anyone else, but it works for me.

One last strange footnote on The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is that it inspired an actual work of literature, a novel of the same name by Robert Coover, which apparently deals with the misadventures of a porn star who wanders around a city called Cinecity with his cock hanging out of his pants. While it was, supposedly, inspired by the film, it would appear to be very different in tone, judging by the fact that one critic said it had too many torture scenes in it. Then again, perhaps watching The Adventures of Lucky Pierre might be considered torture to those who don't like bad movies.

Much of the information on the making of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre comes from David F. Friedman's wonderful autobiography A Youth in Babylon : Confessions of a Trash-Film King.

The film can be purchased on DVD-R or download from Something Weird Video.

King of the Crotch Operas - David F. Friedman RIP (1923-2011)

The name David F. Friedman won't get a mention in any academic course on the history of cinema and none of his films are ever going to get into one of those books of movies you must see before you die, but he brought entertainment to the masses in a way that Godard and Bergman couldn't. He was the first to admit that most of the films he produced were not very good, but he had fun making them and audiences kept coming back for more. At heart he remained the carny that he was before he got into the film business. He entertained by showing people things they had never seen on the big screen before, first nudity, then gore, and later sex. He was the Mighty Monarch of Exploitation, one of a merry band of confidence men (and women) who made up for their lack of skill in filmmaking by including in their films various salacious or shocking ingredients that mainstream Hollywood would not touch. But even more than the visuals in the films themselves what counted was the way they were sold. More was always promised than could possibly be delivered, but that was half the fun. Friedman's philosophy was that you "sell the sizzle not the steak". This is why he was not keen on the arrival of hardcore porn features which actually delivered on his false promises. To him this was poor business. But he did relent and produce some better than average hardcore porn features in the seventies and early eighties.

Friedman's cinematic output falls into a series of genres, each characterising a period in his career. After learning the exploitation film business while working for Kroger Babb, producer of the notorious sex education movie Mom and Dad (1945), with its then shocking birth of a baby sequence, Friedman teamed up with director Herschell Gordon Lewis in 1961 to make a nudie cutie called The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. While loops featuring cute girls cavorting nude had been popular in penny arcades and sold to collectors through the mail for years, it was Russ Meyer who established the nudie cutie feature as a new genre of motion picture in 1959 with The Immoral Mr. Teas. As with any hugely popular innovation, poor imitations of Meyer's work proliferated. Both Teas and Lucky Pierre consisted of a loosely connected series of corny gags featuring beautiful nude women. The spirit was that of burlesque theatre which had always mixed beautiful scantily clad women with low brow gags and slapstick. Friedman and Lewis followed up this very successful first collaboration with two nudist camp movies. One of the key tricks of the exploitation business was to use the pretence of education to justify the presentation of salacious material. Typically, the nudist camp films which proliferated in the early sixties presented serious, somewhat melodramatic, stories of individuals defending their right to nude recreation in the face of conservative members of their community who are worried that the local nudist camp was a front for some kind of depravity. Narration informed us of the emotional and physical benefits of getting our gear off in a communal setting. But the businessmen who snuck into "art cinemas" on their lunch break to lap up all that fascinating flesh were very unlikely to answer the siren call to nude living. The next Gordon/Friedman collaboration was a self-parody called B-O-I-N-G!!! which dealt with the misadventures of two sleazy filmmakers making a movie called "Nature's Nudnicks".

But, by 1963, audiences were starting to get bored with the nudie cuties. After Friedman saw a performance of Paris's Grand Guignol (a theatre which presented gruesome simulations of dismemberment and disembowelling), he decided that, since people were bored with nude bodies, the only way forward was to start exposing internal organs. He and Lewis made the infamous Blood Feast. A leg came off, a brain was removed and a woman's tongue was ripped out of her mouth, all in blood-drenched close-ups. When the film hit drive-ins audiences went wild. People screamed, fainted and threw up, and then came back for more. In Baltimore a young John Waters peered over the back fence of his local drive-in and saw something that would help to inspire him to become a filmmaker. Friedman and Lewis made two more gore pictures together - Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red - as well as more nudies before going their separate ways. (They would team up again in 2002 to make a sequel to Blood Feast.) One of the last of those original collaborations was a film called Scum of the Earth (1963), which pointed the way to the next stage in Friedman's career. This was one of the first of what were known as "roughies". The roughies were generally shot in black and white and had very melodramatic stories filled with violence, including sexual violence, and general depravity. They usually contained nudity, but often less of it than the cuties, but added sex scenes to the mix. Of course the sex scenes were not very explicit at all, but the overall atmosphere was of something dark and kinky and forbidden.

Friedman was not an auteur. While he sometimes did some directing, he was almost never the credited director on any of his features. He did, however, write or co-write most of the scripts. While he may have produced films by many different directors, you can see Friedman's creative stamp on every film. Friedman's best roughie was called The Defilers (1965). He borrowed the basic plot idea from William Wyler's The Collector (based on the novel by John Fowles) which had just come out. But in Friedman's movie there was more than one collector. It told of a pair of sadistic delinquents who kidnap a girl and subject her to sexual torment. The director was Lee Frost, who would go on to make many notoriously sadistic exploitation pictures. Friedman made a couple more roughies with other directors, but it was a film he made in 1966 which became the blueprint for the type of picture which would be  his specialty for the rest of his career.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill was a colourful tongue-in-cheek period sex romp directed by Pete Perry. This was the first of a series of sexy spoofs which would take on various established Hollywood genres, including western (Brand of Shame (1968)), science fiction (Space-Thing (1968)), Valley of the Dolls-style showbiz melodrama (Starlet! (1969)), jungle adventure (Trader Hornee (1970)) and the swashbuckler (The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972)). He referred to these pictures as "crotch operas" or "crotch hoppers". He found the desperation of the patrons of adult cinemas to see naked flesh kind of ridiculous so he expressed that in the parodic nature of many of his films. Even when he made some softcore films which played it straight, one feels that, for him, it was all one big lark. Irony was never lost on him, such as that of being a Jewish man playing a sadistic Nazi officer in his friend Bob Cresse's Love Camp 7 (1969). And he would also produce the most notorious of all Nazi-sploitation pictures Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975), which was shot by director Don Edmonds on sets left over from Hogan's Heroes.

Of all his films, Friedman's personal favourite was She-Freak (1967) a low rent remake of Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). He loved it best because it was filmed at a carnival. Friedman was a carny first and foremost and his films were just like a carnival ride. The sex romps were never quite as exciting as you hoped they would be. They left you feeling dissatisfied. But there was only one answer for that. To step aboard the next one.

Films like Blood Feast and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS get a lot of attention on horror fan sites, so I've decided to pay my tribute to the great man by watching his sex comedy films and reviewing them here, beginning with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and finishing with his first hardcore film 7 into Snowy (1978).

Friedman's autobiography A Youth in Babylon is one of the best books ever written on the exploitation movie business. Unfortunately his promised sequel Kings of Bablylon never made it into print.

Buy Friedman's movies from Something Weird Video :